Asking the Wrong Questions

After I published my effusive review of Adrian Tchaikovsky's City of Last Chances , I received a comment from Tchaikovsky on twitter noting that he intended to continue writing in the novel's world without continuing directly from its story. This made sense to me, both because the breadth and complexity of the world revealed in City could clearly support many different stories in many different settings, and because the novel that City most reminded me of, Perdido Street Station by China Miéville, had similarly spawned standalone sequels in separate settings. Two years later, we are four books deep into what has become known as the Tyrant Philosophers sequence (with a fifth book coming next year), and the project that seems to be emerging from this series feels more complex than what I had originally imagined. While each of the novels in this series stands alone and has a different setting and protagonist to the others, there are progressions that become clear when you r...

There's something almost irresistibly appealing about the musical biopic. It combines melodrama and genuine accomplishment. It conveys profound importance—this is about music, after all, the kind of music that worms its way into people's minds and hearts and becomes part of the set dressing of their psyches—while at the same time being unbelievably trivial and soapy, reveling in the bed-hopping and drug habits of a bunch of self-absorbed people of moderate talent. It was almost inevitable that fiction writers would begin embracing the form, as seen in books-turned-TV-series like Daisy Jones and the Six , but I don't think I expected science fiction to get in on the action. Or, at least, not in the form that Jordan Prosser has done in his debut novel Big Time , which is making its way to UK publishers this year after its Australian publication in 2024. For Prosser, the gargantuan importance of art, and the silliness of the people who make it, are both shades with which he i...